Abstract
This chapter argues that the experience of migration mediates the conceptualization of transnational and transcontinental identities and therefore the theorization of diaspora as a concept. Contemporary African writers have variously contributed to re-thinking the concept of diaspora through its Atlantic framework. The chapter therefore returns to the debates around the “Black Atlantic” and reads the “uses of diaspora” in contemporary African imagination. In this way, the chapter determines that Michelle Wright’s “epiphenomenal spacetime” speaks more broadly to the re-conceptualization of the African diaspora in this contemporary moment. It reads the way Helen Oyeyemi migrates the trope of the spirit child (abiku) and re-locates it into a diasporic context in ways that speak to the complicated realities of the contemporary or “new” African Diaspora. Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House on the other hand speaks to her broader project of making connections between the North and South Atlantic as overlapping frames of contemporary diasporic imagination.
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- 1.
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza “Rewriting the African Diaspora” 54–55.
- 2.
Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country for Instance gives a historiography of Nigerian intellectuals who formed the bedrock of its civil service and who were part of this period of diasporization. Achebe’s own Obi Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease represents such a literary figure.
- 3.
Zeleza “Rewriting the African Diaspora”, 55.
- 4.
Zeleza “Rewriting the African Diaspora”, 41.
- 5.
Brent Hayes Edwards “The uses of Diaspora”, 62.
- 6.
Zeleza, “Rewriting the African Diaspora”, 63.
- 7.
Zeleza “Rewriting the African Diaspora”, 41.
- 8.
Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora”, 57.
- 9.
I borrow this term from Tsitsi Jaji’s (Africa in Stereo), 4, in reference to how African diasporic solidarities and intimacies are mobilized through music. Wainaina’s memoir as explicated in the previous chapter invokes sonic networks through which transnational African identities flowed.
- 10.
Isabel Hofmeyr’s article “The Black Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean”, 3–32, draws our attention to the need to forge new “paradigms” that take the “transnationalism” and translocalism of the global South as potentially contributing to newer conceptualizations of Diaspora. See also Dan Ojwang’s book Reading Migration and Culture.
- 11.
Zeleza, “Rewriting the African Diaspora”, 35.
- 12.
Michelle Wright, Physics of Blackness, 5.
- 13.
Zeleza, “Rewriting the African Diaspora”, 55.
- 14.
Wright, Physics of Blackness, 14.
- 15.
Wright, Physics of Blackness 16.
- 16.
Edwards “Uses of Diaspora”, 64.
- 17.
Edwards, “Uses of Diaspora”, 65.
- 18.
Edwards, “Uses of Diaspora”, 65.
- 19.
Isidore Okpewho & Nkiru Nzegwu The New African Diaspora; Benedicte Ledent et al. New perspectives on the Black Atlantic: Definitions, Readings, Practices, Dialogues.
- 20.
Q & A with the author, Open Book Festival, Cape Town South Africa September 2013.
- 21.
See Selasi’s article “Bye-Bye Barbar” first published in 2005 on The Lip Magazine http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76 and later republished in 2013 in the Journal Callaloo, 528–530.
- 22.
See Rocio Cobo Pinero, “Americanah: Translating Three Countries into English and the Afropolitan Consciousness”, 85. See also Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire “Is Afropolitanism Africa’s New Single Story? Reading Helon Habila’s Review of We Need New Names”. See also Bwesigye’s “Beyond the Afropolitan Nation”, 103–116.
- 23.
Yogita Goyal, “Africa and the Black Atlantic”, xv.
- 24.
Chris Abani has also attracted controversy about some of his own accounts growing up as a teenager in Nigeria. See Pa Ikhide’s 3 December 2011 about Abani’s experiences of imprisonment while growing up in Nigeria- https://xokigbo.com/tag/chris-abani/
- 25.
Mukoma Wa Ngugi, The Rise of the African novel, 180.
- 26.
The category “Black British” has been problematically used as a conceptual category for these writers, see Mark Stein, Black British and Kadija Sessay Write Black.
- 27.
Earl Lewis “To Turn as on a Pivot”, 765.
- 28.
Jane Bryce, “Half and Half Children”, 64.
- 29.
Bryce, “Half and Half children”, 64.
- 30.
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, “Double Consciousness”, 277–286.
- 31.
Helen Cousins, “Unplaced/Invaded”, 1.
- 32.
Cousins, “Yoruba Gothic”, 47.
- 33.
Diana Adesola Mafe, “Ghostly Girls”, 21–35.
- 34.
This concept of spirit children, here seen as abiku and Ogbanje, has various other variations. See Tunde Akinwumi “Wall-Gecko Motifs in tattoo and on Fabrics and Their Magico-Religious Management of Yoruba Abiku”.
- 35.
Timothy Mobolade, “The concept of Abiku”, 64.
- 36.
John-Pepper Clarke, “Abiku”, 205; Soyinka, “Abiku”, 189.
- 37.
Okri, Famished, 478.
- 38.
John Hawley, “Ben Okri’s Spirit-Child”, 31.
- 39.
See Cooper Magical Realism; Gaylard After Colonialism and Warnes Magical Realism.
- 40.
Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism”, 261–285.
- 41.
Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism”, 265.
- 42.
Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism”, 31.
- 43.
Christopher Okonkwo, “A Critical Divination”, 651–668 and Chikwenje Ongunyemi, “An Abiku-Ogbanje Atlas”, 663–678.
- 44.
Ongunyemi, “An Abiku-Ogbanje Atlas”, 670.
- 45.
Ongunyemi, “An Abiku-Ogbanje Atlas”, 665.
- 46.
Okonkwo, “A Critical Divination”, 651–652.
- 47.
Michelle Wright, “Middle Passage”, 217.
- 48.
The novel is rife with such allusions. The title of the Icarus Girl is derived from Greek mythology, while the tone is reminiscent of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Certainly, the eccentricity of Dickinson’s poetry, and its preoccupations with death and immortality, parallels Jess’s affinity for closeted spaces, her fugitive imagination and the enchanted world of doppelgangers and abikus.
- 49.
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 145.
- 50.
James Donald, “On the Threshold”, 1–10.
- 51.
Robert Young, “Psychoanalysis and Political Literary Theories”, 139–157.
- 52.
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 28.
- 53.
Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 28.
- 54.
Leroy et al. “Yoruba Customs”, 132.
- 55.
Leroy et al. “Yoruba Customs”, 132.
- 56.
Leroy et al. “Yoruba Customs”, 134.
- 57.
See, for instance, in Chikwava’s Harare North.
- 58.
Okonkwo, “A Critical Divination”, 653.
- 59.
Simon Gikandi, Maps, 2.
- 60.
Beauty Bragg “Racial Identification”, 123; Helen Cousins “Unplaced/Invaded”, 1–16.
- 61.
Michelle Wright, Becoming Black 1–26.
- 62.
Avtah Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 128.
- 63.
McCabe, “Histories of Errancy”, 44.
- 64.
Wright, Becoming Black, 3.
- 65.
Wright, Physics of Blackness, 5.
- 66.
See also Kimberley J Lau’s “Snow White and the Trickster”, 371–396.
- 67.
Edward Soja Postmodern Geographies, 73.
- 68.
Brenda Cooper, “The Middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora”.
- 69.
Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4.
- 70.
Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 3.
- 71.
Gilroy Ibid., 19.
- 72.
Cooper, “The Middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora”, 109.
- 73.
Most of the titles that precede different sections of The Opposite House are also drawn from the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
- 74.
I am drawing on Matory’s emphasis on translocalism as it precedes the concept of transnationalism.
- 75.
See George, Santeria; Falola and Childs, The Yoruba Diaspora; Bial & Brady The Performance Study; Holloway, Africanisms.
- 76.
Wright, becoming Black.
- 77.
Gilroy, Aint no Black & Black Atlantic.
- 78.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism.
- 79.
For further details, see “Christine Ayorinde (2004) Santeria in Cuba”, 209–230.
- 80.
Goyal, “Africa and the Black Atlantic”, xvi.
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Ouma, C.E.W. (2020). Diaspora Childhoods: Creating Sublimated Connections. In: Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36256-0_6
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